The Anglican Archbishop of Canterbury has dropped a theological bombshell on the heads of many deeply conservative Christians by announcing that God “is not male,” even though this aligns with the church’s official catechism.

Archbishop Justin Welby told an audience at St. Martin-in-the-Fields in Trafalgar Square in mid-November that no gender word is suitable to describe the eternal being at the heart of the religion.

“All human language about God is inadequate and to some degree metaphorical,” he was quoted as saying by Britain’s Daily Mail.

Despite God continually being referred to as “our Father” in the Bible, it is erroneous to appoint a human gender to “Him” as this is too limiting, the archbishop said.

“God is not a father in exactly the same way as a human being is a father. God is not male or female. God is not definable,” Archbishop Welby said.

“It is extraordinarily important as Christians that we remember that the definitive revelation of who God is was not in words, but in the word of God who we call Jesus Christ. We can’t pin God down.”

While the announcement may shock some, a recent poll of British Christians by YouGov found that just over 40 percent of respondents had already come to the same conclusion that God is neither male nor female.

However, the majority said they still refer to the deity using the male pronoun.

The media also quoted Christian history professor Diarmaid MacCulloch as saying that, “God is beyond such things.”

“The reason that God has been seen as male is simply the patriarchal assumptions of these [ancient Greco-Roman] societies,” he said.

“The world is now different and we have to show that our view of God is wider than that and not get stuck with archaic terms.”

Newsletter

Get the latest from La Croix International. Sign up to receive our daily newsletter.

Solidarity Fund

"La Croix International relies almost entirely on subscriptions and donations from readers. We hope that you will consider supporting our efforts to deliver quality journalism worldwide." Arnaud Broustet, Publisher